Why do brands need a print management partner and what benefits does it bring? Let our expert explain…
An outsourced print management partnership is an opportunity to redefine your print supply chain, through a new purchasing strategy designed to deliver better value, better quality, and better marketing outcomes for your brand.
Print management in a nutshell
Print management is managing the purchasing of marketing print, often using a specialist partner with more buying power than your brand would have by itself.
Done effectively, this not only ensures competitive pricing, but improved consistency and reduced time to market – speed that cannot be achieved by in-house teams.
Saving money on print, boosting the bottom line
The print category includes all branded materials – general marketing print, POS (point of sale), direct mail, retail displays and promotions and merchandise.
We typically see that big brands spend between 1% and 3% of the business’s overall revenue on this marketing collateral, so the print management category can have a real impact on your bottom line.
Outsourced print solutions for modern marketers
In today’s marketplace, print solutions need to deliver far more than simple cost and quality improvements. You need solutions that are innovative, sustainable, transparent, and – most important – effective from a marketing point of view.
Successful integrated marketing needs printed material to be in line with other marketing channels and resonant with your audience.
Modern marketing people are exceptionally time-poor. Marketing print and production is a drain on time for stretched in-house teams, and prevents them focusing on their strategy and campaign ideas.
For an in-house marketer to be required to deal with marketing collateral distribution, POS (point of sale) fulfilment and build, and all the other logistical challenges that come with distributing marketing to networks of retail outlets or dealers makes little sense.
An outsourced print management partner will handle all of that work – so your team can focus on conceiving marketing that’s going to work for your brand.
Direct and indirect procurement savings
By counting on an outsourced print management company's global buying footprint you can focus on your marketing messaging, rather than execution challenges.
A global print management partner like Indicia Worldwide means you can be flexible and fast-moving, rather than try and deliver each marketing print project with limited in-house resources.
At Indicia Worldwide, our approach gets closer to your business – our experts become an extension of your procurement and marketing teams, even working alongside you in your premises if that setup would work for you.
Indicia Worldwide incorporates Charterhouse – a business with more than half a century of heritage in print management.
Consistency and control
A global outsourced print management partner also delivers brand guardianship that you simply can't match without significant in-house investment. For example, we bring experts in colour and print technology to deliver consistency of your identity around the world and across channels.
And through a global audit of your printing activity, we’ll identify opportunities to 'harmonise'. This process whittles down the myriad different printed formats and products that you make around the world, and creates a consolidated catalogue of available assets. This ensures stock and printing services are bought efficiently, globally.
We’ll join the dots between your silos to ensure consistency and efficiency of spend.
Control through data
In modern marketing, data is the driving force behind managing and optimising what you do. By using an outsourced print management model, all the data around your buying is in one place.
This means analytics can power both performance of assets and efficiency of spend. Data gives us the power to initiate meaningful change in business practices and buying behaviour – to the benefit of the bottom line.
And the added bonus of meaningful data analytics is that it’s all completely visible to you, your boss, and your board if necessary. Data means reporting is informed and meaningful.
Manually pulling data together from the multiple suppliers in use by multiple members of your in-house team is no way to work in this day and age. A good outsourced print partner will automate your reporting to suit your needs.
Technology efficiency
Our technology platform brings a new level of efficiency and effectiveness to your production processes. We can deliver tech solutions that take care of campaign management, job management, and proofing.
We also implement future-proof asset-management systems that open up your production.
And, we can implement sharing technology that keeps everyone on the same page, putting assets, ideas, and opportunities to collaborate in the hands of your people.
Sustainable print is central to modern marketing
Sustainability is rightly a hot topic in business – many big brands are placing sustainability front and centre in their overall strategy. And those that aren't – well, they know that they should be.
Print clearly has a vital role to play in improving sustainability credentials. It's important to consider the whole lifecycle and carbon footprint of your marketing materials – and for global businesses producing localised collateral around the world, this can be a very complicated job.
That's why an outsourced print management partner is a great way to augment stretched internal teams and take sustainability goals into consideration.
Indicia Worldwide takes sustainability very seriously. We've been certified carbon neutral since 2012, and we also hold the very highest Gold accreditation with EcoVadis, the world's primary sustainability business rankings organisation.
Summary: why print management?
So, print management is about much more than finding a local printing company and briefing them your jobs. For a large brand, that approach is unworkable and expensive.
A good outsourced print management company will help you:
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Use global buying power to save money on direct and indirect print procurement
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Save time for in-house marketing and procurement teams
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Bring brand guardianship to your global marketing
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Be fast and agile, by working on site with your teams if that would suit you
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Provide transparency of spend through robust handling of data and clear reporting
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Use technology to make assets readily available and easy to order and manufacture
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Work more quickly towards a more sustainable supply chain
Why choose Indicia Worldwide?
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We are completely independent, working with more than 1,500 certified supply chain partners
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We do not own production facilities – we work with our print partner network to deliver the best in price and quality for each project's needs
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Accounts are managed by dedicated local teams who speak the local language and understand local market dynamics and challenges
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We are certified by EcoVadis, and all partners are scrutinised to ensure sustainability standards are the highest in the industry
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Account management teams are empowered to select suppliers locally – on average 80% of supply produced in market
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We create new value across the entire marketing process – with print management in place, we can offer further efficiencies when you buy other services from us. Check out our full service range here
At Indicia Worldwide, we bring a fresh perspective and a new approach to an established industry, while maintaining the sound and simple principles of print management.
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